In the preparation of a tender for a technical plant and its detailed planning and design for later implementation, it has until now usually been necessary to work out a proposal for the plant configuration and a corresponding price offer purely manually on the basis of specification data of the technical plant, available for example as tender specifications, the proposed plant configuration being intended to satisfy in principle the requirements of the tender specifications as far as possible. The actual realization of the technical plant then includes the selection and ordering of actually obtainable plant components, which are interconnected in a way corresponding to the plant configuration worked out. Plant components are understood in this connection as meaning both hardware components, for example computers, printers, programmable controllers, etc., and software components, for example operating systems, user programs, databases, data acquisition programs, control programs, etc.
In order to reduce the amount of work, in particular when preparing a tender for a technical plant, it is currently often the practice to revert to tenders already drawn up earlier or plants already planned and designed in detail earlier. Then one would update, supplement and revise these data manually for a tender currently to be drawn up or detailed planning and design currently to be carried out.
The quality of the result is in this case only as good as that of the similar case prepared earlier. In particular, it is very difficult in this way to incorporate innovations which have taken place in the meantime with respect to the techniques used, pricing, etc., with the result that errors are virtually unavoidable.
Until now, the activities mentioned above in the preparation of tenders for a technical plant and its detailed planning and design have been carried out substantially manually in the implementation phase. They have therefore been time-consuming and susceptible to errors.